Texas convenes grand jury to investigate Uvalde school massacre

A Texas prosecutor has convened a grand jury to investigate the Uvalde school shooting, US media reported, as families of the 19 children and two teachers killed continued their calls for criminal charges against officers involved in the hesitant and haphazard police response to the massacre.

Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell told the San Antonio Express-News on Friday that a grand jury will review evidence related to the Robb Elementary School shooting on May 24, 2022.

She did not disclose what the grand jury will focus on, the newspaper reported.

The Uvalde Leader-News first reported the empanelling of the grand jury.

Relatives of the children and teachers who were fatally shot renewed their demands for the indictment of police officers after the Justice Department on Thursday released a scathing report that again laid bare numerous failures by police during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in US history.

"I'm very surprised that no one has ended up in prison," said Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of the two teachers killed in the shooting, said on Thursday. "It's sort of a slap in the face that all we get is a review ... we deserve justice."

The release of the nearly 600-page report — roughly 20 months after the shooting — leaves a criminal investigation by Uvalde County prosecutors as one the last unfinished reviews by authorities into the attack at Robb Elementary School. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed inside two fourth-grade classrooms while highly armed police officers waited in the hallways for more than an hour before going inside to confront the gunman.

US Attorney General Merrick Garland called the police response "a failure that should not have happened."

But the report is deliberately silent on the question that still burns in the minds of many victims' families: Will anyone responsible for the failures be charged with a crime?

President Joe Biden said on Thursday that he had not yet read the full findings. "But I don’t know that there’s any criminal liability," he said.

He also praised the legislation, while also calling for Congress to "pass common sense gun safety laws to ensure that mass shootings like this one don't happen in the first place."

No charges, slow-paced investigation

Since the shooting, at least five officers have lost their jobs, including two from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the on-site commander, then-school district police chief, Pete Arredondo.

But no one has been charged in the criminal investigation that was led by the Texas Rangers.

The Justice Department report says the FBI has assisted the Rangers but is not doing its own investigation.

The Rangers — part of the Texas DPS, which had more than 90 officers on the scene of the shooting — submitted their initial findings at the start of 2023.

Mitchell initially said she hoped to bring the case to a grand jury by the end of last year, but she pushed back that timeline in December and said on Thursday that she would need time to review the voluminous Justice Department report.

"I am a working DA with a small office," Mitchell said in an email on Thursday. "It is going to take me a while to go through this report. I am hopeful that it was informative for the community.”

The pace of the criminal investigation has long frustrated families of the victims, Uvalde's former Republican mayor and a Democratic state senator who represents the small South Texas town and has called for the head of the Texas state police to be fired.

"Twenty months later, there's no end in sight for this local district attorney to be able to do anything," state Senator Roland Gutierrez said.

"We don't know if she’s going to indict anybody at all. It’s really a shame where we are now."

'Cascading failures'

In the report, federal officials detailed "cascading failures" by police, from waiting for more than an hour to confront and kill the gunman to repeatedly giving false information to grieving families about what had happened.

Produced by a Justice Department office that supports local police, the document is among the most comprehensive accounting to date of what went wrong.

It says training, communication, leadership and technology problems extended the crisis, even as agonised parents begged officers to go in and terrified students called 911 from inside a classroom where the gunman had holed up.

Parents of children killed in the shooting grew up and went to school with some of the officers they now blame, and they feel abandoned by local and state leaders who they see as intent on moving past the massacre.

"We need our community," said Brett Cross, who was raising his 10-year-old nephew, Uziyah Garcia, when the boy was killed in the shooting.

"It is hard enough waking up every day and continuing to walk out on these streets, walk to a [grocery store] and see a cop who you know was standing there when our babies were murdered and bleeding out."

Cross is among those who hope the Justice Department report will unify Uvalde around a common set of facts and spur criminal charges.

During a news conference in the city, Garland stopped short of saying if charges should be filed, leaving that to Mitchell.

The Department of Justice report faults state and local officials with undercutting the public's trust in law enforcement by repeatedly releasing false and misleading information about the police response.

That includes Governor Greg Abbott, who initially praised the officers' courage "running toward gunfire."